Yet, with exceptions (Thiaw 2008) systematic analyses of race and racialization are hard to find in this scholarship. The expansive corpus of the historical work on the impact of slavery on the African continent continues to provide detailed demographic and community-level political impact of the slave trade and slavery. But that same literature hardly includes systematic analyses of the emergence and continuing significance of race as another clear ongoing legacy of the trade (especially after the trade officially ended). The vast historical and anthropological literature on the slave trade’s legacy in Africa reflects the dramatic transformations of societies (Adjaye 2018 Getz 2004 Inikori and Engermen 1992 Meillassoux 1991 Miers and Kopytoff 1977 Rodney 1966). Moreover, the trade’s direct aftermath was European colonial control of most of the African continent.
If one of the legacies of slavery in the Americas was the racialization of enslaved Africans-and indeed the racialization of the modern world-did this legacy of race not also simultaneously impact the communities on the African continent? Did ideas of racial difference and identity, forged through the slave trade, not also impact the West and Central African communities of Fantes, Ibos, Wolof, Fulanis, and others? Indeed, it is clear that the Atlantic commercial trade in Africans created cultural, economic, and political aftershocks for affected communities on the continent-restructuring identities and allegiances, geographies, communities, and politics. This essay is an attempt to confront another aspect of this configuration. (Omi and Winant 1994)This characterization of the historical process of racial identity making for descendants of enslaved Africans and their enslavers in the New World-the making and consolidation of a modern New World Blackness and Whiteness-is the framework on which we continue to interrogate the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade in the Americas today. By the end of the seventeenth century, Africans whose specific identity was Ibo, Yoruba, Fulani, etc., were rendered “black” by an ideology of exploitation based on racial logic-the establishment and maintenance of a “color line.” … With slavery … a racially based understanding of society was set in motion which resulted in the shaping of a specific racial identity. The racial category “black” evolved with the consolidation of racial slavery. A classic view of this racialization-by-slavery comes from sociologist and historian Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their well-known theory of “racial formation,” when they state: As such, racialization becomes one key site for understanding the lives of both the victims of slavery and its perpetrators. In addition to capitalist needs, the racialization of slavery was soon buttressed by the rise of racial science and the ideological, political, and cultural construction of a “Black” Other. For the Europeans on the other side of the trade, it is the simultaneous homogenizing of their group differences into “whiteness” along with claims of superiority (Horne 2020). 2 It involves, for Africans, the rendering of the various and distinctive political and sociocultural identities into a debased category through relationships of exploitation, control, and exclusion. Racialization is the complex set of historical and sociopolitical processes of attributing superior or inferior status based on the presumption of biological difference. One of the commonly accepted legacies of the transatlantic slave trade in the Western Hemisphere is the establishment and consolidation of the modern idea of race and racial difference, 1 as well as the practices of racialization, that uphold white supremacy. I argue for an understanding of the modern development of African societies that shifts from exclusive investments in local configurations to systematic approaches in which the histories and legacies of slavery and race are situated. And I suggest a reconsideration of the ways we apprehend African community formation post-European contact. I focus specifically on the ways that the legacies of anthropological knowledge production in Africa depend on racializing tropes of Africans while simultaneously impeding this type of racial analysis. This essay asks, If one of the legacies of slavery in the Americas was the racialization of enslaved Africans, and indeed the racialization of the modern world, did this legacy of race not also impact the communities on the African continent? The essay grapples with this question by insisting what should be a baseline understanding: that modern racial consciousness, and especially global racialization processes that emerge in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade, also impacted continental African communities.
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